How Much Economic Freedom?

Forestwalker asks: "can you articulate how what you're advocating here in regard to the political and social/spiritual sphere is different than what libertarians advocate in regard to the economic sphere?" I think the question relates more to my 2/20 Religion and Politics post  more than to Subjects and Objects post where it appeared as a comment, so I'll attempt an answer here.

Libertarians believe that citizens should be given as much freedom to operate in the economic sphere as possible.  In the three spheres as I talk about them, this kind of freedom is the guiding principle in the cultural sphere, not the economic sphere.

The guiding principle in the economic sphere is 'obligation'.  We have an obligation to support ourselves, but we also have an obligation to the commonweal.  What precisely that means can be worked out in the political sphere, where those obligations can be spelled out in detail. 

This leaves room for flexibility depending on practical considerations.  How much of a role should the market play?  How much of a role the state play?  There are no absolutes here as there seem to be in the libertarian-style market theology.  It's mainly a question of people trying to figure out what works best.

One's ideas about what works best are influenced by activity in the cultural sphere where ideals and values are explored and promoted.  It makes a difference if the culture is dominated by a materialistic understanding of how the world works and what motivates human action or whether religious ideals shape the soul of the culture.  It makes a difference if Ayn Rand is the national prophet or Karl Marx.  A culture's values profoundly influence its ideas about what is good for the commonweal economically and in turn its politics. 

For me most of the persuasive work has to happen in the cultural sphere.  People today feel overwhelmed by the economic complexity of the world system, and they are bankrupt of ideas about what to do or how to act in the political sphere, so the tail wags the dog, and we let it because we who know things are not right with the political and economic alignments in our society can propose no plausible or robust alternative. It's not for lack of ideas but for lack of control of the cultural institutions that determine what is plausible or not.   Plausibility is in very large part shaped by what people believe is possible, which is an issue that needs to be clarified and discussed in the cultural sphere.

My own beliefs about what should happen in the economic sphere follow from some basic principles.  First, each able bodied man or woman has a responsibility to himself and to the larger community to support himself and to contribute to the common good in some way.  People should be rewarded for their industry, and should be allowed to accumulate wealth, but there needs to be a wall separating  the wealthy from having any more political power than any other citizen. It's probably undoable, but I would be interested in exploring some formula that would create some kind of tradeoff between economic influence and political influence.  The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter.  You want to be rich, fine. We'll protect your rights in that regard. But stay out of politics.

I think freedom in the economic sphere is a practical value and by no means an absolute value.  Freedom in the economic sphere when promoted as an absolute leads inevitably to concentrations of wealth and power and of the domination of the weak by the strong.

I think the principle of subsidiarity should operate on the level of markets, which means that people should be able to produce, buy, and sell as they please with as little interference from governments as possible.  But when things get out of balance, such as when some people are too wealthy and others too poor, a democratic state should have the power to redress the balance when it serves a democratically determined common good.  What balance means needs to be debated in the cultural sphere of values and ideals.

But this isn't a radical idea.  It's the basic principle justifying trustbusting, state and federal regulation, WPA- and TVA-type projects, entitlements for the disabled, etc. Such policies are Libertarian heresy.

But this is pretty much the way things worked in this country since the New Deal.  No one questioned the basic principles underlying the New Deal compromise until the rise of Ronald Reagan here and Thatcher in England. I am  opposed in principle to Thatcherism and Reaganism, by whose principles there is simply no such thing as a common good.  That isn't to say that I wouldn't agree with their complaints that the state sometimes overstepped its bounds.  But those are practical considerations, not considerations of principle.   

Thatcherism and Reaganism were an extreme reaction that are unbalancing things now in the other direction, and that we allowed things to swing so far in their direction has put us in a very precarious spot.  Because now the power has shifted dramatically to those with a lot of wealth, and they have expanded their influence from the economic sphere to the political sphere, and now they are using their economic and political power to dominate the cultural sphere through the mainstream media.  And as a result, they determine what is plausible or not plausible; they determine what is thinkable and what not.  Sure we're free to think what we want in the for now independent blogosphere, but we will be allowed to do so long as we're not a threat, and so far we're not one.  We're just bloviating for the most part, me included.

Comments

[forestwalker]

Actually, I had the Subjects/Objects post in mind, particularly the conclusion drawn in the last paragraph:

"And any kind of poltics of the future has to start here. It has to begin with communities of Selves establshing an alternataive to the mass consciousness that drives political movements and their propagandistic manipulation. In the meanwhile we do what we can to resist the forces that would de-Selve us, and maybe that's all we can do for the moment. And for me there are no more potent texts to empower our resistance to those forces than the Gospels."

Replace "the Gospels" with "the writings of Ayn Rand" and that paragraph would sit well with the more philosophically serious libertarians. Can you talk more about how the Self that you're describing is different from the libertarian Self. And are "communities of Selves" different than the libertarian idea of "voluntary association"?

What you wrote in Subjects/Objects and in Given/Chosen resonates with me. But the Libertarian ethic, though it presents itself in a similar way, makes my soul retch. I have a rough idea of what the difference is but can't quite put my finger on it.

[Jack Whelan]

Robert--

Ok, now I understand the issue. It has to do with my use of the word Self, and it's one of those things I'm so accustomed to think about in my own way, that I forget the Ayn Randian connotations it evokes.

For me, the Self is the shattered image that is what we refer to in biblical language as our having been created in the image and likeness of God. In order to see God face to face, (self to Self) as St. Paul promises that we shall, we have to develop an ontologoical substantiveness that we don't currently possess because of our fallenness; it's something we have to grow or heal or reassemble from the psychic shards of our fallen condition.

The Self to which I refer, therefore, is a work to be accomplished through grace, and its endpoint is imaged for us in the resurrection body of Christ. It is in this sense that I understand Paul when he says "not me but Christ in me," i.e., "not-me" = Randian fallen self; Christ-in-me" = the growing seedling presence of the resurrection body, a presence some awaken to with more consciousness than others, but which I believe is active in everyone insofar as he is capable of responding freely to grace, which is ubiquitous and available superabundantly to all who avail themselves of it.

I would also point to the significance of the traditional Catholic understanding of the Eucharist as "real presence" in this light, because it is literally the food that builds the resurrection body in us. It is in that sense the food that nourishes the "I Am" in us which is the created image and likeness of the uncreated "I Am" that Moses encountered on Sinai.

So my idea of the self could not in this respect be more different from Ayn Rand's, whose idea of self is a celebration of the self in its fallen predatory state that we call egoism or self-ishness. The Self to which I refer only lives to the extent that the Randian Self dies. Again the Mass is the celebration of that transfer; it reenacts the moment on Calvary when the Christ in dying lives into our death, so that we in turn have the possibility to die into his life--the only way I know of to grow a Self worth caring about, one that is truly capable of love and truly capable of being free and impervious to manipulation by the usual suspects.

Thanks for asking the question. I'll probably rework this comment in a fuller response on the main blog. While I don't feel that I am pulling any punches about where I'm coming from on the main blog, I'm also aware that I have a wide range of readers, and I'm trying to find an idiom that invites people to think about issues in a way they may not have considered before. So I try to restrict the use of technical theological language which is usually freighted with a lot of baggage I don't really want to carry. Nor do I like to overdo the bible citation bit, which I have always found tedious and off-putting, but there is all of that behind everything I write.